Grant for the Web announces $250,000 in funding to early grantees

Grant for the Web is proud to announce a quarter million dollars in funding to our first five awardees – curated projects and individuals that demonstrate the breadth of experimentation in the expanding Web Monetization ecosystem. From an urgent COVID-19 response project that monetizes collaborative documents for charitable relief to a hackathon offering developers a chance to learn about open standards in Web Monetization, to an artist exploring ways to generate revenue from her original work, these awardees demonstrate that there is a fierce appetite and enormous talent for exploring new ways - and motivations - to exchange money on the web using open standards.

• Free Music Archive: We are delighted to fund Dutch-based Tribe of Noise, the owners and stewards of Free Music Archive – the world’s leading source for free and royalty-free music. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors download 2TB of openly-licensed music from Free Music Archive’s servers. Their project will integrate Web Monetization into the platform while leading a community discussion about how creators and users can benefit from Web Monetization tooling built on open and sustainable web standards. Keep reading about Free Music Archive.
• Coronavirus Tech Handbook: We are inspired by how a small team of technologists at Newspeak House in London created what has become the world’s largest library for COVID-19 response with contributions from around the world. The custom software behind the handbook – JoeDocs – is a collaboration tool designed to support crowdsourcing and rapid community development by allowing communities to quickly assemble and simultaneously contribute to a knowledge base, and for that project to be sustained through integrated monetization. Keep reading about the Coronavirus Tech Handbook.
• DEV: We are excited to announce a partnership with DEV on a community hackathon driving exploration and experimentation around the Web Monetization standard. DEV’s platform boasts 350k+ registered developers and millions of monthly visitors and they will not only implement a site-wide payment pointer as a real-life application of the technology, they will also introduce functionality enabling authors to add their own payment pointer to their own posts. Keep reading about DEV.
• Grant for the Web Ambassadors: When Grant for the Web launched in September 2019, we knew we needed creative, ambitious individuals willing to experiment, play, and communicate how Web Monetization can work for the long tail of content creators, so we created the Ambassador Program to fund ecosystem evangelism and dynamic case studies. We’re proud to announce our first two Ambassadors, Hui Jing (better known in the devrel community as HJ), a web developer from Malaysia and the founder of Talk.CSS, and Cris Beasley, an entrepreneur, artist, and podcaster based in the United States who digs into progressive tech, emotional awareness, and startup topics. Keep reading about Cris and HJ’s projects. 

“It’s exciting to see efforts like these begin to build momentum toward the future web we envision, where content creators and consumers can both thrive and invasive ads aren’t the economic status quo. These projects demonstrate how a new business model for the web can better reward creators, drive more openness and decentralization online, and shift power back to individuals.” – Ashley Boyd, VP, Advocacy + Engagement, Mozilla Foundation

 “Creative Commons is pleased to see the diversity and breadth of the early grantees, reflecting the values of this important collaboration.” – Anna Tumadóttir, Director of Product, Creative Commons

These early awardees were selected by Grant for the Web’s Advisory Council through a vetted process for curated grants targeting research, tool development, and community experimentation. We are currently running a public Call for Proposals open to technologists and creators from around the world. Learn more at grantfortheweb.org

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